(2024-04-20) Message in a Bottle, But Metaphorically

Details

Author:	Mishell
Summary:	Ace receives a letter out of the blue.
Rating:	T for Teen

Arc: Season 16: Twilight Approaches

Chain: Bottles

Ace,

I used to write letters to Ma when I needed to tell someone what happened to me. But now I don't know who to write to. I suppose Boomer's my best friend, but she was there. You have to be explaining it to someone who doesn't know, for it to come together right and make sense.

We saw Deathwing today. Close. Here's what he looks like.

(a quick sketch, in as few lines as possible. Dragon head, yes, but wrong, lines too sharp, forged-looking. Serrated, hard, unnatural, mad.)

And Alexstrasza, the Dragon Queen.

(another sketch, another dragon head. Adorned with gems, somehow motherly, in even fewer lines than Deathwing.)

She was bigger than I thought. And she killed him, Ace, I swear she did. Or we all did. We helped. But the bastard just got right up again.

Someone called him the Aspect of Death. I don't even remember who, now, but I thought, can the Old Gods do that? Can they give him that much power? Is that why we couldn't kill him, because he's in control of death now, just like Nozdormu controls time? Could They make the other dragons into Aspects of… Despair, Decay, Madness, Chaos… whatever they wanted?

Some of the red dragons want us to kill the entire black dragonflight. All of them, wipe them out. But the Titans are masters of Order, and they set us up with five kinds of dragons. They must have picked the five for a reason, right? And maybe some of them aren't holding up their end of the balance right now but you can't fix that by removing them completely, can you? If a table leg is wobbly or crumbling do you chop it off and call it a day?

It bothers me. Is a twisted thing really worse than no thing at all? It depends on the thing I guess. What if it's a load bearing thing? I thought dragons knew better than this, saw bigger.

Anyway, sorry to drop this on you out of the blue. I haven't been quite the same since that Wildhammer wedding, the one where the officiant suddenly sprouted tentacles and then we fell into the mouth of an Old God creature, a mouth the size of a small village. That part wasn't even a nightmare or a vision. I've got the half digested robe to prove it.

Is it really okay not to be okay? Does that sentence make any sense?

You don't have to answer any of this. I think I just needed to write it down.

Bran